A great way to make money from your art is to merchandise it. With merchandising, you put your artwork on t-shirts, mugs, posters, greeting cards, and other products. Normally, you have to fill out a licensing agreement with a company, which then makes and markets all your fine art gifts.

CafePress.com does it a little differently. You merchandise the art yourself. You set up a store on their site, upload your images, and then choose which products you want to sell. They make and ship the products for you. You get a fee for each sale, determined by you.

This place is pretty cool. I recently set up my art store and it was very easy to do. I filled out a sign-up form, and I was ready to go. I took my time setting up my artwork for upload because I wanted to get the proper dimensions and resolutions for each product. Once I was done, uploading my work to their site was a simple one-step process. And designing the products was a snap as well.

Best of all, my store was free. I did not have to pay anything to set it up. I got the Basic store. The one drawback to this type of store is that I can sell only one of each product per store. For example, I can sell only one large poster per Basic store on my site.

However, they do let you set up as many Basic stores as you want. I currently have a dozen or so of them. That way, I can sell more than one of each product. For instance, I have one Basic store that sells mugs based on "The Meeting" artwork. I have another Basic store that sells mugs based on my "Midnight Orange" piece.

You can link to all your Basic stores using a single URL with commas between the store names; for example www.cafeshops.com/yourstore1,yourstore2,etc. However, depending upon how many pieces of artwork you have, you may have dozens of Basic stores. This can get unwieldy (I am finding that out now).

They do offer a Premium store that enables you to sell as much of each product as you like. For example, you can sell large posters, mugs, and t-shirts of all your artwork from one store. If you buy a Premium store for a year, it is only $5.00 per month.

Once my store gets its sales increasing, I am going to switch to the Premium store. That way, I can sell prints and other merchandise of all my artwork from a single Premium store, instead of having to sell merchandise through dozens of Basic stores. Premium stores also get access to more products, such as framed prints.

Being an artist, I find that one drawback to the stores is that the print sizes are preset. For example, the mini poster print is 11in x 17in. Most of my art is 8in x 11in, so I find I have to crop some it off in order to fit the mini poster size (unless I want a lot of whitespace on the print).

Also, once you upload an image to their site, you cannot manipulate it, such as resizing it or rotating it. Because of this limitation, I resize and rotate all my images in Photoshop and then upload them. However, this results in my having to upload multiple sizes of a single piece of artwork in order to get it to fit well on the various products. (This takes up a lot of their server space, but they have not yelled at me yet.)

But, those complaints aside, I think CafePress.com is a great place. It allows you to merchandise your art quickly and easily without having to worry about inventory, printers, shipping, etc. You worry about your art; they worry about the rest.

If you are interested in joining CafePress.com or would like more information about it, click here.